This article was originally published on Common Edge.
The rise of generative AI has given all design educators ample reason to rethink what they teach and how they teach it. Architect training is a long process, and mapping it into an uncertain future can be daunting. Researchers at OpenAI, DeepMind, Meta, and similar companies always seem surprised by the rapid development and sometimes unexpected capabilities of their AI works. If even the Creator does not know how fast the future will arrive, it would be arrogant for any of us to claim: AI does X or AI won't be able to do Y The next 10 years is about how long it takes to actually train an architect.
Discussions about what and how to teach are already contentious and will inevitably need to evolve with technology. Until the impacts of these new technologies are more clearly understood, some of them will remain unresolved. However, there is one other conversation that is much easier. do not have To teach.
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This conversation is historically contentious and inseparable from the debate over what to teach. However, in my own classes and conversations with colleagues, there seems to be a consensus among design faculty that certain things should not be taught in architecture schools. These anachronisms are a fixture in most schools because of institutional and cultural inertia, and perhaps because schools can still produce great architects despite them.
But AI will change that calculation. It gives us new arguments to dispel some of the more rigid practices of design culture. An anachronism that was frustrating yesterday could become a liability tomorrow, undermining our ability to train young architects and their ability to stay in the profession. Thanks to AI, we finally have the means and motivation to remove three things traditionally unique to the educational process.
masochism
If generative AI can speed up the process of visualizing and creating designs by a factor of 10, it would be a great tragedy to allow students to instinctively spend all that increased productivity in all-nighters and self-neglect. Probably. Despite the efforts of many design educators to suppress these instincts, the culture of self-neglect and exhaustion in design schools persists and proves to be a difficult problem to solve.
Part of the problem is certainly that there are still valuable lessons to be learned in the more self-deprecating parts of studio culture. Architecture school taught me to keep iterating, to “kill my darlings” and to realize that if you keep an open mind, a better solution to any problem might just be around the corner. You told me. Once you embrace a frenzied commitment to improving your work, staying up all night seems like a logical expression of that commitment.It was justified, but it wasn't reason. The reason was that testing, proving, and demonstrating an idea takes much more time than coming up with it in the first place. The human brain can be inspired within a second. But to test, prove and demonstrate the idea, it needs to be implemented in the form of drawings and models.a lot One of them. Therefore, if you value your ideas, it is better to start drinking coffee in a pot.
This may seem reasonable, at least to someone who has attended architecture school, as long as you ignore downstream effects. If you stay up many nights in a row testing and proving that great idea, your creativity will steadily decline and that second or third great idea will suffer.
The importance of sleep for creativity cannot be overstated. Research consistently shows that a well-rested brain is better able to generate novel ideas, solve complex problems, and think critically. In competition with machines, lack of sleep becomes a tactical disadvantage. If “creativity” is the main hall of an architectural castle, we must protect it at all costs by protecting our sleep and staying up all night.
But how do you get the job done? Shout out to all architecture students everywhere. In the future of AI, a day in the life of an architecture student may look a lot like a day in the life of a modern writer. For a creative writer, inspiration and production are often done as one act. Think, type it, repeat. I'll review it later. Most writers recognize that the human brain can only be creative for a limited amount of time, and that it requires input such as sleep, exercise, and diet to maximize creativity. I follow a designed and disciplined schedule. Haruki Murakami wakes up at 4am and only works 5-6 hours a day. He spends his afternoons running, writing, and listening to music. Maya Angelou had a similar habit, writing only from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m., finding a hotel and “a small, mean room with only one bed, sometimes a sink if she could find it.” She got up at 2:00 every day, ran some errands, had dinner with her husband, and got a good night's sleep, leading a normal life. No one would argue that Murakami and Angelo are uncreative or failed people. And great novels have structures as complex as great buildings.
Imagine if an architecture student worked only six hours a day, and the entire time was devoted to pure creation, and machines took over production.
As AI rapidly takes over the mechanical and mechanistic aspects of design, humans must focus their efforts on what humans can do. If you believe that creativity is a sacred element, then optimize your creativity by breaking with this ugly tradition.
Therefore, ask your students to leave the studio and go home at a reasonable time. Claim it. Insist that they design and do their best and then go home or go out. My advice is to meet people your age, preferably in fields other than architecture. Ask them to take up a hobby or join a club or sports team. (parable acapella If you really need it, add it to the group. )
Tell them what you already know: Architecture is life itself. Love, loss, risk, and failure are the driving forces behind true creativity. And sleep is the engine oil that keeps them working. So, get some sleep and let the machine take over your vigil.
fetishization of the image
For most of prehistory, architecture was primarily a spatial experience and was valued for inhabiting that space. However, with the advent of mass media, architecture, more than any other discipline, began to lean toward an image-based culture. This change has led to mass media being able to differentiate between different types of professional success: commercial success (earning money), professional success (being respected by colleagues), and cultural success (being respected by the wider culture). This is probably due to fragmentation.
In most professional fields, these three types of success typically follow a continuum. But there is another route to architecture, and we call it Path B. This route overturns the traditional order and, as far as I know, is unique to architecture. Through Path B, architects can achieve cultural success by gaining the respect of their colleagues, even if they build projects with limited commercial success.
With enough professional and cultural success, you can: after that For commercial success, clients will line up to hire a famous architect that all other architects respect. (It is always interesting that some architects may win the Pritzker Prize, which is ostensibly a“Architects who have demonstrated in their work a combination of qualities of talent, vision and commitment, who have consistently made significant contributions to humanity and the built environment.”— has a very shallow portfolio of work built primarily on the strength of publications and theoretical research.Equally interesting is how the same architect after that (continues to develop an extensive practice filled with large and expensive construction projects).
To be sure, architects can, and often do, go the traditional route. But architects also have a path B that is hard to imagine in other professions. If Warren Buffett had lost all of his early clients' money on his first foray into investing, we would never know who he was, and if all of his early clients had gone to prison. , I don't even know who Johnnie Cochran is.
The presence of path B in architecture enables and facilitates the fetishization of image making.If your objective is commercial success beginning, Focus on what your client cares about, such as meeting a budget or constructing a building. If your goal is professional success first, you will focus on things that other architects are interested in, such as novel ideas, experimentation with forms, materials, and other forms. Anything new is much easier to create and communicate through images instead of wood, brick, concrete, metal or glass. So architects began to embrace that image. thing as adequate evidence for the concept of things in themselves. A person can gain notoriety by creating and disseminating images of every novel building imaginable without incurring the burden of execution. And if you become famous and are in demand, you can take on the task of realizing these ideas in concrete form.
The rise of AI in architecture poses a fundamental challenge to the viability of pursuing Path B. With AI-powered tools that can generate stunningly innovative renderings based on text prompts, simply creating impressive architectural images no longer means the same level of creativity and innovation. It will no longer be. It used to be that way. As a result, it will become increasingly difficult to gain early recognition primarily through video production. How could that be? We're not going to praise an architect who creates work that could easily be done by his teenager with a ChatGPT subscription.